The Culture-Actualization Index©

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The Culture-Actualization Index ©  is for organizations who wants to build a proactive culture KPI for increasing retention and engagement.  The Index measures culture as employee experience and offers practical insights. Our focus on developing culture action plans and supporting implementation with culture coaching also differentiates this whole journey from other survey experiences.  

The survey works for large, mid-sized and small businesses, profit, non-profit and governmental organizations. The survey is ideally used for a whole organization, a whole unit and can also be used for large teams. 

The quickest and easiest way to start your culture transformation initiative is to fill out the form below. A Maslow representative will reach out to you to confirm details, discuss a timeline, and clarify your needs and expectations.

The survey contains our 26 culture index statements, two open-ended questions, and demographics. It takes about 10-15 minutes to complete. 

Our 26 culture index statements + 2 open ended questions are not customizable, but you can add your own custom questions and demographics.   

Our summary report includes your organization’s overall Culture-Actualization Index as well as a Basic Needs, Psychological Needs, and Growth Needs Index. It further includes a detailed breakdown per statement by favorable, neutral, and unfavorable responses as well as an employee voices report with responses to our open-ended questions. Larger organizations will also receive a heatmap that lets you analyze employee data by department, job role, managerial level, demographic factors, and more to uncover patterns and disparities in employee experience.  

Our team will work with you throughout the whole process to ensure a smooth experience and meaningful outcome. We will send the survey link and reminders to your employees during the survey phase and provide technical support along the way. 

We are also going to provide you with the following resources:  

• User manual: for a detailed overview of our process 
• Survey communication guidelines: including answers to frequently asked questions and templates of email communication you can use to keep your staff informed of all steps pre, during and post survey. 
• Posters: to distribute in central areas around your office 

We are partnering with Inturvey, a science-focused survey consultant and people-analytics firm. Inturvey works with academics and practitioners with advanced degrees in Industrial Organizational Psychology. Their expertise is built on years of experience in collecting and analyzing quantitative and qualitative data with a focus on employee engagement, retention, diversity, equity, inclusion, validation processes, psychometrics, and more. Inturvey’s team will support you throughout the data collection phase to ensure you’re collecting the right kind of information. After the survey has closed, Inturvey will turn your people data into meaningful results. The reports you’ll receive from us will be the starting point of your culture change initiative.

Our primary survey platform is QuestionPro, an industry leader in insights, experiences, and software recognized by Forrester, Gartner, Quadrant Spark Matrix, G2 Crowd, and more. The QuestionPro system has been built with data privacy, protection, anonymity, and compliance in every layer. It is fully compliant and holding certifications such as General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), ISO 27001:2013, CCPA, PCI-DSS, Section 508, PHI, and HIPAA. 

As an alternative, we can also administer our survey on Qualtrics, a platform that powers everything from market research projects to customer experience, product testing, employee experience and brand tracking projects. With US, Canada, APAC and EU data sovereignty, it’s trusted by 16,000+ businesses and institutions worldwide, from multinational banks to Government departments. The platform is ISO 27001 certified and FedRAMP authorized – that’s the “gold standard” of security certification used by the U.S. Government for SaaS providers. 

 Absolutely. All survey responses go directly to our survey partner Inturvey who collects your data so that they can ensure its integrity (i.e. no employees are taking the survey more than once), send reminder emails only to employees who have not completed the survey, and edit survey answers if requested by an employee. Once data collection has been completed, email addresses are deleted, and the data is no longer identifiable.   

Raw data will never be shared, you only receive summary reports. Teams with fewer than five respondents will NOT receive reports to ensure confidentiality in smaller teams. It is our priority to ensure that employees feel they can safely and accurately complete the survey. 

To maximize the impact of the survey results and ensure meaningful outcomes, it's crucial to involve all levels of management in the process, from top executives to team leads, to foster a sense of ownership and commitment to driving positive change. It is important to communicate transparently with your employees about the survey's purpose, emphasizing that their feedback will directly influence decisions. This not only boosts participation but also encourages honest and constructive responses.  

Work with an Executive Culture Coach to actively involve cross-functional teams to analyze the data collaboratively, gaining diverse perspectives and insights. Once you've identified key areas for improvement, create a clear culture action plan with measurable goals and assign responsibilities for implementing changes. Regularly communicate progress back to your employees to demonstrate that their input is driving real transformation. Remember, the survey is a starting point – it's how you interpret, act upon, and share the results that truly elevates the employee experience and drives positive organizational change.

We have been conducting qualitative and quantitative research since April 2020 to both understand the new employee needs framework in the post-Covid era and develop a tool to measures culture as employee experience from this needs perspective.  

Several rounds of focus groups with professionals and industry experts, a Mitacs funded partnership with St. Mary’s University’s Organizational Psychology department, extensive literature review, subject matter consultations, and a two-wave study with over 400 participants delivered the following insights: 

• The 26 statements of the survey accurately reflect employees’ basic, psychological, and growth needs in the post-Covid era. 
• The CAI survey is strongly related to measures of similar constructs and on par with other industry leading surveys. 
• The survey shows an exceptionally high level of reliability, confirming that it is testing what it is intended to. It also produces moderately stable results over time, in line with the expectation that it properly represents changes in an organization’s workplace culture over time. 
• Higher scores on the CAI were directly related to higher scores in trust in the organization, psychological safety, creativity, work engagement, job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and job performance as well as lower scores in turnover.